Britons’ health slipping as night on the tiles takes its toll

AP, London

The girls slumped in wheelchairs look barely conscious, their blond heads lolling above the plastic vomit bags tied like bibs around their necks.

It is an hour to midnight on Friday and the two girls — who look no older than 18 — are being wheeled from an ambulance to a clinic set up discreetly in a dark alley in London’s Soho entertainment district.

They are the first of many during the night to be picked up by the ambulance — known as a “booze bus” — and carried to the clinic, both of which are government services dedicated to keeping drunk people out of trouble and out of hospital emergency rooms.

Binge drinking has reached crisis levels in Britain, health experts say, costing the cash-strapped National Health Service ￡2.7 billion (US$4.4 billion) a year, including the cost of hospital admissions related to booze-fueled violence and longer-term health problems. Unlike all other major health threats, liver disease is on the rise in Britain, increasing by 25 percent in the last decade and causing a record level of deaths, according to recent government figures. Doctors believe rising obesity is combining with heavy drinking to fuel the spike in liver disease, which is hitting more young people than ever.

“Undoubtedly professionals are seeing more [patients] in their late-20s to mid-30s, which would have been unusual 20 years ago,” said Chris Day, a liver disease specialist at Newcastle University.

On the streets of Soho, most people are too busy drinking to notice passed-out partygoers. The streets, lined with pubs and nightclubs, are just beginning to get rowdy: Men chasing each other and shrieking like teenagers; women stumbling and falling over in their too-short skirts and high heels. Soon the sidewalks are littered with empty beer bottles and reeking puddles.

Such public displays of extreme drunkenness are inexplicable and shocking to many foreigners living in Britain, even those who hail from heavy drinking cultures.

“[At home] it’s embarrassing to be drunk. Here it’s kind of something you brag about,” said Kaisa Toroskainen, a Finnish graduate student in the UK capital having a beer with her friends.

The headline-grabbing figures about ever-younger liver disease victims may seem to suggest that the UK has quite recently turned into a nation of raging alcoholics, but it is not news that the British like their tipple. This is, after all, a nation known around the world for its ales and its pubs, the default venue for any British social gathering from a quiet date to after-work socializing.

Despite that, most experts agree that Britons, on the whole, do not drink more than other Europeans — in fact, overall alcohol consumption levels here have come down since the mid 2000s.

However, that is the average. The problem seems to lie with a minority of hardcore drinkers who tend to down a huge amount in a short time.

“The key point is the ways in which we behave when we’re drinking — it involves very public displays of reckless drunkenness,” said Jamie Bartlett, a researcher at the London-based think tank Demos who has written about alcohol abuse. “It’s not an issue of consumption. It’s an issue of behavior.”

Anyone who has gone out on a Friday night in any of Britain’s larger towns and cities will be familiar with boozed out groups of people shouting, brawling and causing a scene as they spill out of bars and pubs. Commuters are not immune to the antics — especially on evenings when soccer matches are on.